


Counting Stars

by ruffaled



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Romance, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Trailer, Don't copy to another site, Friendship, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Tony Stark, M/M, Nebula & Tony Stark Friendship, Nebula (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Romance, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-15 01:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17519480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruffaled/pseuds/ruffaled
Summary: Stranded on a dead ship and adrift in interstellar space, Tony reflects on the Avengers' catastrophic failure in stopping Thanos, his broken relationship with Steve and the growing friendship between him and Nebula, forged by their shared losses and lifetimes of enduring pain.





	Counting Stars

**Author's Note:**

> This is written based off the Avengers: Endgame trailer and hints about a friendship between Tony and Nebula while stranded in space.

Tony stopped counting time after the third week adrift in interstellar space.

The ship crawled around the outer edges of mammoth gas clouds — up close they were invisible, nothing more than clumps of dust left undisturbed for billions of years, waiting for just the right conditions before matter could coalesce, and morph into blinding, radiant stars lighting up another dark spot in an endless universe.

The intricacies of Quill’s ship occupied Tony’s mind during most of his waking hours — it was only the second alien spacecraft he had encountered. Under normal circumstances, Tony would’ve lost his mind with excitement, forgoing daily routine in favour of studying the otherworldly tech until he fell asleep on his feet. The ship had escaped Thanos’ wrath on Titan unscathed, without so much as a scratch. Its occupants ran out of luck, crumbling into scattered ash on the planet’s surface, doomed to remain there forever.

For an alien vessel, the Benatar was compact; it was smaller than what Tony had expected; the ship’s size resembled commercial passenger jets ferrying hundreds of passengers daily around the Earth. The flight deck had been fitted with a curved glass extending outwards from floor to ceiling. The sleeping berths lined up the back of the aircraft, next to the galley and storage units, and there was an empty docking bay at the tail end. A small elevator shaft from the galley led down to the cargo hold where, behind a narrow door, the ship’s reactor core stood. It was the heart of the ship, giving it the means to move at near light speed and cover great distances in the cosmic vastness. The reactor’s blue glow matched the one in Tony’s chest.

“Your clothes smell. Here, these were Quill’s. They’ll fit you,” Nebula told him one day after a meal—Tony lost track of breakfasts, lunches and dinners. They ate every eight hours when an alarm pinged on his watch, reminders for meal times. The food left on board was freeze-dried, packaged in sealed containers, and came in various colours. Everything tasted bland, unappetizing, but the growls in his stomach forced Tony to swallow every bite, even when the insides of his mouth felt like dried husk.

The clothes were three sizes too big on Tony. The red tunic slid off his shoulders, revealing collarbones. Nebula observed him with glazed curiosity, watched his every move inside the spacecraft until one day, after almost two weeks onboard, she said, “You’re not like him. You’re different.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, snorting. “Flash Gordon was… _something._ ”

Nebula tilted her head. The reference eluded her.

“It’s… nothing. Forget it.”

“For a Terran, you’re very durable,” she said from the seat across Tony.

The Benatar moved in silence through an unending sea of black, following the coordinates trembling fingers had keyed in after a turbulent takeoff on Titan, carrying with it a thin fragment of hope — an unwavering faith that their destination, a small backwater planet on the western spiral arm of the galaxy, still stood in its axis.

They almost hadn't made it out of Titan. The planet’s off-kilter gravity had nearly grounded the spacecraft for good. Thanos had won through his sheer willpower and wiped out half of all sentient life in the universe—how does one come back in the face of such overwhelming, consuming defeat? The answer had dodged Tony and Nebula’s minds as they watched the distance grow between the decaying planet and the ship. Loss and devastation sank in their guts, the guilt felt like ankle weights, dragging them underwater, and in a fleeting moment of clarity, Tony had suggested they travel to Earth.

There was a group of heroes, the Avengers, he said in a low, indistinct voice. They’d know what to do. When Nebula left to the galley, Tony stared at the infinite enormity of space, remembering the vision foretelling his legacy, the end of the path that started the first day he had put on the armour. For all he knew, the Avengers died, slaughtered like lambs, while fate’s cruel blade left him alive as punishment. He had meant to take the fight away from Earth, spent six years preparing for the day of reckoning, but in the end, the plan exploded into a catastrophic failure against Thanos’ unflinching resolve. The Avengers paid the price and he didn’t — just like the dire prophecy had predicted. He shuddered at the thought.

“I don’t know what to do,” Tony said, sinking into his seat. “I’ve been preparing for this for years, but Thanos… he wiped us out with a snap. It was child’s play for him.”

Nebula looked down at her hands. Tony remained wary of the slender, metallic fingers. Images of cold, unfeeling metal on pale, warm skin flashed across the periphery of his vision, leaving him reeling, and raw. He cast a quick glance at the hand in question. It was damaged from the fight—the articulated joints were banged up, he could tell, from the way Nebula struggled with her grip. The knowledge helped Tony sleep better.

“It’s not your fault. I had a chance to kill him but I was too arrogant. He caught me before I could finish him off.”

“What did he do?”

Nebula’s eyes, black and bug-like, flashed. The metal casing around her left eye jutted out with a pop. A small holographic projection of Thanos appeared. “I’ll show you,” she said.

Tony regretted asking as soon as the first scream pierced the ship’s silence. A scene played out of Thanos taking Nebula apart, piece by piece, with a manic glint in his eyes. When Thanos pushed something that resembled industrial tongs—his mind flashed to a collection of those hanging on the walls in his workshop—into Nebula’s mouth and pulled a portion of her tongue out, Tony's tolerance peaked. Blue liquid gushed over purple hands, her screams reduced to pained whimpers. He closed his eyes, stooped lower in his seat—everything about the scene sounded familiar. Intimately, so. Images of a dark cave smelling of gunpowder and the insides of a lavatory flickered in his mind; he remembered the cold gnawing at his skin, rough and parched, covered in bruises. His water-filled lungs had felt like lead pressing down on his spine whenever he lay down while the wound, the gaping hole at the centre of his chest, raw and smelling of cheap, store-bought disinfectant, screamed in protest. He shuddered at the memory.  

“I’m sorry. I am so sorry,” Tony said in a whisper when the video stopped and the holographic projection switched off, leaving them in semi-darkness.

Nebula adjusted the metal casing and stuck her tongue out. Tony squinted, and, in the ship’s dim lights, he saw it had been sewed back together, uneven. “It’s not the worst thing he has done to me but, this time, my sister paid the price. Because of me, because I couldn’t succeed in something I’ve spent my whole life preparing.” Her fist slammed on the console next to her, the sound of metal clashing against metal reverberating through the ship, and Tony flinched. When she stood up, he shrank in his seat, his pulse racing, mind calculating all of the painful ways she could finish what her lunatic father had started. Part of him welcomed the possibility of dying at the hands of an alien, hidden behind the stars, billions of miles from home.

She stalked forward and leaned over him, bending till she stood at his eye level, her hands gripping the handles on his seat. “There’s only one thing left to do, Stark, and that’s to kill Thanos. He must answer for what he did, for the people he killed. My sister. Quill. Mantis. That big oaf. Your friends. The child. Their blood is on his hands, and you’re going to help me take him down. Do you understand?”

Tony swallowed, shrinking in his seat under her cold, penetrating gaze. He nodded.  “I… yeah. Yeah, I’ll help you.”

\----------

The first sign of trouble surfaced in the middle of listening to a distress call on the common frequency. Rushed voices spoke in a garbled tongue that neither Tony nor Nebula understood, but they picked up on the rise and fall in tones, a symphony of distress, anxiety, and along the way, the voices dropped from the channel one by one. Only a solitary, quivering voice remained, pleading before the broadcast ended without warning.

Tony turned off the radio. He left the flight deck and pulled up a chair in the galley, opposite Nebula. A bowl of grey, translucent soup sat in front of him. It smelled like chowder-gone-bad, but the hunger pangs clawing at his stomach walls won out. Tony slurped and emptied the bowl in a handful of big gulps, retching at the pungent aftertaste flooding his mouth as he tasted the bile rising at the back of his throat. “I feel like you’re feeding me sewage water and calling it gourmet,” he said, wiping his tongue on his black tank top.

Nebula looked amused, her lips curling upwards. Before she could utter a word, the lights went out, leaving them seated in the dark.

“Ah shit,” Tony said. “Power failure? It should come back online soon… there must be a backup gener—”

A thunderous noise shook the entire structure of the spacecraft, setting off a dozen alarms in the cockpit. Nebula rushed to the elevator, Tony hot on her heels. The cargo hold was filled with smoke, the acrid smell of burnt metal and melted plastic choking the air supply to Tony’s lungs and burning his eyes. He bunched up his tank top and pressed the fabric over his nose, covering his mouth as he followed Nebula towards the reactor core in the other room.

“It’s melted,” Nebula said, raising her voice over a new set of alarms that beeped from the machines connected to the reactor. “We’re out of power.”

Things went downhill from there in record time. When the smoke receded into the ventilation shafts, Tony took a closer look at the core. Earth physics took him as far as identifying the components making up the reactor but, beyond that, he drew up against a solid, unmoving wall. The technology was alien, the fuel source, unknown, and the spacecraft had stopped moving since the explosion, five days earlier, leaving them stranded. The only direction of time and distance they had was the position of the nebula millions of light years from Titan—when they left the planet, the faint, coloured clouds had been visible from the right side of the cockpit, wispy like morning fog in Winter, and then shifted out of view as they trudged on, homebound.

“We need help,” Tony said, returning to the upper level. Nebula sat, scanning the radio frequencies. The same sounds repeated on every channel: Chaotic, desperate pleas for help echoing throughout a broken universe. “Without power, we’re sitting ducks. Food and water will last us another month, tops, and then the oxygen’s gonna run out.”

“There’s nowhere to go.” Nebula’s voice cracked. Tony gripped her shoulder, gentle, reassuring. She leaned into the touch. Beneath the mechanical stoicism lived the real Nebula, hiding from years of punishment that Thanos had meted out for her shortcomings. Tony saw her surface only a handful of times—once, while in the throes of his nightmares, he heard a whispered lullaby in his ear, sang in a tongue he didn’t understand, by a voice softer than Nebula’s. It had soothed him back to sleep and she avoided his gaze when he woke. In another moment, he had watched her examine the damaged helmet—all that was left of his suit—with a childlike curiosity.

“We’ll figure something out,” Tony said, kneeling in front of her. Inhaling deeply, he reached for her hands, _both_ of them, and clasped them between his own. The metal felt warmer than he had expected, unlike the thick, cold, and unfeeling fingers recurrent in nightmares about an abandoned bunker hidden in a sea of white. “Come on, get some rest.”

When Nebula’s eyes drifted close, Tony grabbed the helmet and went down the elevator shaft. The cargo hold was empty except for a stack of boxes containing what resembled jetpack-like devices and blue-grey hemispheres the size of an average palm. “Holographic spacesuits. Protects you out there,” Nebula had said the first time they stumbled across the boxes.

Tony sat in the middle of the room, cross-legged, setting the helmet down in front of him. He reached near the temple, pushed a button and a holographic screen flickered to life—much like the one Nebula had. Tapping the metallic forehead, he said, “Is this thing on?” Printed letters appeared, hovering mid-air. They read: _Voice activation approved._

“All right, start recording. Message 001.” Tony puffed his cheeks and exhaled as his own image, sitting in the dim-lit cargo hold of an alien spacecraft, appeared on the screen. “Hey. Listen, if you’re seeing—it’s gonna be a longshot anyway—but if you find this, then, I’m probably dead. And no, it’s… not your fault. Coming out here was my decision. Was it a wise one? Probably not, but I just wanted to take the fight away, you know. Avoid collateral. Ross would’ve made me do paperwork for the rest of my life, otherwise.”

Tony laughed, mirthless, the sounds echoing off cold, empty walls. Secondary stats displayed on the screen—from the suit’s interface—showed temperature hovered in the low 40s, turning the tips of his fingers and toes blue. Oxygen saturation dropped to 82 percent, his chest tightening as his body put up a valiant fight to pump more breathable air into his lungs.  

“I don’t know what’s going on back home,” he said, rubbing his eyes, sleepiness pooling around the edges of his consciousness. Tony lost track of when he last slept but knew it had been before the plan, to return home, regroup and avenge, exploded in his face. “Can’t be anything good. It’s madness out here. This ship is pretty much done for. The power core collapsed, and we have no way of finding help because I’m not sure if there’s anyone left to help. The guy who owned the ship is dead. A bloke from Missouri. He loved _Footloose_. He would’ve felt at home with you.”

Tony sighed. On some levels, commandeering Quill’s ship, eating his food, wearing his clothes, felt wrong, disrespectful, even. But he had been at the end of his rope on Titan, with a high-tech band-aid slapped on a vicious stab wound, and the ashes of a seventeen-year-old kid still stuck under his fingernails. Tony had scrubbed his hands on board the ship until the skin split open, red rivulets trickling into the wash basin. Nebula had bandaged his hands without a word. The enormity of their defeat was _still_ sinking in on several levels. He focused on the big picture, the damage done to entire galaxies out there because the smaller, more intimate details felt like a thousand little cuts on soft, pliant flesh. _Please, Mr Stark, sir, please, I don’t wanna go. Idon’twannagodon’twannago—_ Peter’s panicked plea never stopped ringing in Tony’s ears.

“How did we lose so badly? We were the Avengers. Once. We should’ve stopped him. We should’ve done better. We let Thanos win and, now, there’s nothing left to avenge. Tell me I’m wrong.”

The screen fluttered. No sound came from inside the helmet. Tony reached forward, turning it off, sitting in partial darkness. Thoughts bubbling just beyond his consciousness threatened to erupt, engulf him whole, and Tony wilted under the overwhelming pressure. His mind replayed the actions from the beginning that led him to a remote corner of the universe, lost, without a way of finding his way back home. It started with a blinding column of blue light that shot up into the cloudless sky.

“Who were you talking to?” Nebula asked hours later when they sat down to eat. She was back to her firm, expressionless self. “Earlier, I saw you talking to your helmet. Were you calling for help?”

Tony shook his head. The bowl of orange liquid next to him was left untouched. “Not really. It was a long shot—I tried to send a message back to Earth, but I don’t think it worked.”

“You think someone will come for us?”

“No,” Tony said. “Unlikely. Thanos left Earth last. We—someone I knew had the mind stone. I don’t think he’s alive… I haven’t really thought about the rest. You heard the radio calls. You know what’s going on out there.”

“It was worth taking a chance.”

“We’ll see.”

\----------

The screen booted up once Tony tapped the helmet near the temple. He sat on the floor in the flight deck. Nebula had been tinkering with the dead reactor core for the past two hours without much success.

“Record. Message 011. It’s me again. I’m still here and that surprises me as much as it would surprise you. We’re still stranded. All of our efforts to repair the core were futile. I can’t fix the damage and there’s not a planet in sight. Food’s run out, we’re down to the last tank of water, and O2 sat level is at 61 percent. It’s getting harder to breathe, and I think the stab wound is infected. Right now, there’s a pretty exciting race going on, on what’s going to kill me: I’m betting on dehydration.”

Tony swallowed. His throat felt parched. He last had a sip of water before recording his eighth message two days earlier. Nebula had insisted her mechanical modifications could sustain her without water a lot longer than Tony could survive, but he conserved their limited supply anyway. A subconscious part of him tried speeding up the inevitable.

“Look, I’m sorry. For everything. I’m not proud of how I reacted, but I now understand why you did what you did. I guess I thought I had time to stay mad at you for a few years, let things cool down first, you know? But being adrift in space with zero chance of rescue isn't as bad as it sounds. It gave me a new perspective. Time’s limited, and I am not coming home anytime soon or what's left there. So, now is as good a time to tell you: Steve, I _forgive_ you. There, I said it. Words I never thought I’d hear coming out of my mouth, not so soon, anyway, but dying has a funny way of making you re-evaluate priorities.”

He pulled his knees close to his chest, resting his chin in between. The screen stood static—for a second, Tony grappled with recognising the reflected image. His hair had grown with time, and he trusted Nebula with a pair of scissors—he didn’t flinch when metal fingers gripped the base and snipped away at excess hair grazing his shoulders. It was not the best look on him, nowhere close to the fashionable trims from his personal stylist, but it sufficed; he thanked her for the effort. The small, amused smile on her lips had made the asymmetrical cut worth it. Dark circles under his eyes showed more prominently on skin white as a sheet; the corners of his lips turned purple, like the tips of his fingers and toes, and his beard had grown down the column of his neck. The dips around his clavicles appeared more pronounced under the black tank top, and Quill’s shirts hung off his frame like loose, shapeless dresses.

Some days, tucked in his berth under a blanket that smelled like wet animal fur, Tony thought about the Avengers—or what was left of them. The process of elimination told him that Vision was, in all likelihood, dead. Thanos cared little about collateral damage; he wouldn’t have hesitated to rip the mind stone from where it sat on Vision’s forehead. Tony sighed; pangs of regret punching at the base of his spine. He shouldn’t have pushed Vision away, even when he couldn’t look him in the eyes and not hear the whoosh of metal in freefall, crashing back to the green, muddy Earth with a thud that made him tremble at his core. Bruce, after missing for years, showed up through a portal and said Thor was dead. The Asgardian had always been a mystery that Tony tried, over and over again, to solve. His very presence had challenged Tony, a man of science, to reconcile the scientific with the myth. He regretted Thor’s demise. Rhodey had been in therapy and Pepper on her way to a board meeting at the exact moment Tony left Earth. Steve lived in Tony’s memories—a jumble of violent, distorted moving images that left him struggling to tell apart what was real, and what was not.

“Earth’s mightiest heroes. She tore us apart like cotton candy,” Steve once said. The disdain in his tone never stopped cutting through Tony like ice shards poking an open wound. The Avengers started off as something, something exciting, but then came the mistakes—“My fault,” Tony admitted, readily—the compromises until the very name festered into something rotting, putrid-smelling, a catalogue of flaws that crumbled the team’s foundation. _Like cotton candy_ , melted into little clumps, sticky, powdery, and unappetizing.

On some level, the Avengers reminded Tony of the nebulae lurking in distant corners of an endless universe: violent celestial reactions that pushed matter together to grow larger, and hotter, becoming unstable, and eventually fusing into new stars, then planets to solar systems. When the first call to assemble came, the gravity of the situation—Loki’s invasion—pulled them together, like clumped matter, and from the scorching heat of repulsors and plasma cannons, and a blazing nuclear explosion set against the impenetrable depths of deep space, the Avengers were born.

“Steve, if you’re still out there, you must re-assemble the team. You can’t give up. Thanos can’t win. You _have_ to find a way to bring everyone back. Forget the Accords, forget everything we fought over, _you_ need to fight back. The world needs the Avengers, and the Avengers need Cap, you. I just… I wish I was there to see you win. But maybe this is for the best. I would’ve only gotten in your way.”

A week later, the oxygen ran out. Nebula forced Tony into one of the holographic spacesuits, holding him through a panic attack as his lungs scrambled for air and as the material sheathed itself around him—skintight and frigid. She held his head on her lap, his weakened, dehydrated body splayed on the floor, covered by three layers of blankets that did little to stop the shivering.

“Tell me about Steve,” Nebula said, her grip on his bony wrists reassuring him that he was not alone, that he would not die by himself lost in space. “You recorded those messages for him. Who is he?”

Tony puffed his chest out, forcing the limited oxygen inside the suit down his windpipe. They were down to the last pair of suits, which would buy him another 24 hours of breathable air, then it would be the end. He’d die two years short of 50. Whatever gamble Strange took by trading the time stone for his life would’ve come to naught—half the universe would stay dead and Peter would never grow up to vote or legally buy booze. For months on board the Benatar, Tony survived knowing he needed to fix what Thanos broke; if not for anyone else, he needed to do it for Peter. He owed the kid that much. But sitting at the jaws of death, Tony felt helpless. All he had left was to trust the man with a plan to come through, for Steve Rogers to save the universe.

“He’s… Steve’s complicated,” Tony said, wheezing for breath. His neck and chest felt damp, drops of sweat trickled down the side of his face. “We were a team once. He was—we were. Family. No, wait, that—that doesn’t sound right. We were not family. Were we? We were… we were a time bomb. Someone said it, I don’t know who, but it was true.”

“You’re not making sense.”

Tony coughed, his eyes closed. Before his mind could wander off into the old, abandoned bunker hidden by a blanket of white in freezing temperature, a regular feature in his frantic dreams, Nebula jerked him awake. He flinched on instinct and moved a hand up along his chest, fingers trying to claw through the skin-tight suit as if reaching for an unscratched itch underneath. In the narrow space between his heart and heaving lungs, Tony felt a phantom pressure build—of indestructible metal and untempered rage. It weighed him down and kept him immobile on the ship's hard, unfeeling surface.

“Stay with me,” Nebula hissed. “And tell me who he is. Did you love him?”

The question gave Tony pause as he fought off the lethargy settling between his joints to wrap his head around it. Did he love Steve Rogers? _Yes_ , a defiant part of him shouted in deafening silence. _Yes, you did. You would’ve gone to the end of the world, and beyond if he asked_.

He recalled simpler times with Steve: Settling into the Tower between missions, staying up late in matching pyjamas and coffee mugs in hands while it snowed outside, changing the tire on Steve’s motorbike, the smell of grease in his nostrils and the oil stains caught on cheap, dollar-store t-shirts, dragging Steve away from a farmer’s market before his outrage at the price of onions—“How can anyone charge $5 for this, Tony? This is a daylight robbery!”—boiled over into a fistfight.

Tony had committed to memory the solid frame of Steve’s body, which anchored him to the mattress underneath, exactly where he had always wanted to belong; the scent of peppermint toothpaste on Steve’s breath every morning when he woke Tony up with gentle kisses; lazy summer afternoons spent sprawled on large couches, shirtless and under the cool blast from the air conditioners inside the penthouse, away from the sun’s unforgiving glare. Some nights Steve stayed up drawing while Tony slept—in a short time, he had filled a dozen sketchbooks, most of them with pictures of Tony moving through the day.

One morning everything fell apart.

The dry skin on Tony’s lips split, blood dribbling from the cracks, and he tasted the metallic tang on his tongue. His body fell apart piece by piece around him, held in place by the suit that stuck to the shirt and his skin. It would be his coffin, floating in space for all eternity.

“I love him,” Tony said in a brief moment of clarity. “I love him. I’d have done everything for him. He was my world, all of it, but he left. Never even looked back once. The bastard.” He swallowed the bitterness rising at the back of his throat, sharp, piercing; Steve's retreating back, the way his arm had slung around Barnes, steadying him and supporting his weight, floated behind Tony's eyelids. The choice still stung.

“I was so angry with him, I never went after him. Everything fell apart and I wish I could… see him one more time, tell him—”

An alarm pinged in the cockpit. Nebula looked up to see a fluorescent light blinking next to the communication channel. Their ship, stranded and powerless, was being hailed. Someone, somewhere, must’ve heard the dozen distress calls she made. She shuffled Tony off her lap, laying him down on the floor with gentle hands. His eyes closed and she nudged him, trying to jolt him awake. “Stark, we’re being hailed. Someone’s found us. Come on, stay alive. We’re getting off this ship, one way or another.”

Tony enjoyed the darkness behind his eyes. The lack of oxygen quietened his mind for once, leaving it blank, and listless. It felt peaceful. He heard Nebula’s movements—she slipped into the pilot seat, trying to work out the buttons that would open a line to whoever had come for them. For a brief second, Tony considered the possibility of their would-be rescuers being hostile, bloodthirsty aliens—the kind he used to enjoy rattling off by name every time he made Steve sit down to watch his list of favourite science fiction films. The Rathtars were a particularly nasty breed…

Nebula’s voice floated across the radio. “This is the Benatar. We are stranded, we are out of food and water, and we are a man down. We need medical assistance and—”

A voice cut her off. “Tony Stark. Is Tony Stark with you?”

It sounded familiar. Deep, baritone and laced with worry—the kind of paranoid worrying that Tony used to once make fun of. His mind swam in a sea of foggy memories, trying to remember the owner of that voice. It must’ve belonged to a friend, he thought. The voice seemed _comfortable_ and—

“Please. My name is Steve Rogers. Please tell me he’s on your ship.”

Steve… Rogers.

Rogers.

Steve.

_Steve_.

Tony’s eyes snapped open.

— FIN —

**Author's Note:**

> The fic was beta-ed by the ever generous, and ever-patient, [@goose-danvers](http://goose-danvers.tumblr.com/). Thank you for catching all of my atrocious grammar errors. All remaining mistakes are mine. 
> 
> You can follow me on Tumblr at [@rescueironman](http://rescueironman.tumblr.com).


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